Famous for grand novels in which his characters try to digest what is happening around them while important world events unfold over an extended time frame, William Boyd has become a master of the genre, creating main characters who feel real as they and their families deal with the traumas they face over a long period of time, coming to new recognitions about life and themselves. In this new novel, William Boyd “breaks the rules,” taking the point of view of an ambitious woman who becomes a photographer the moment her father gives her a Kodak Brownie No. 2 for her seventh birthday in 1915. Avoiding the usual traps of a man writing as a woman, Boyd creates a fine portrait of Amory Clay, a woman who defies the usual limitations placed on women in British society during the early and mid-twentieth century, showing her life as she travels to political hot spots; records major and minor events in the years after World War I, through World War II, postwar France, and Vietnam. She also associates with the aristocracy, literary lights, and artists and creates her own rules regarding her love life – and just about everything else. Neither beautiful nor brilliant, Amory relies on her own insights, talent, and sense of adventure to reveal hidden worlds through photography, not in the dramatic sense of revealing the horrors of battle and its destruction, but through those moments in the midst of crises in which people reveal their humanity and connect with others, including the reader. Numerous vintage photographs add to the atmosphere and characterization.
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“On a Sunday evening, I went with some colleagues to an auction of contraband memorabilia in a karaoke bar in Little Havana…I had no intention of blowing my check, but, without the least warning, the god of tiny details set paradise before me…Right there, in the depth of the Sunday solitude of a Little Havana auction I found them: my new teeth…the sacred teeth of none other than [Hollywood diva] Marilyn Monroe…slightly yellowed.”—Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, or “Highway.”
If that quotation does not pique your curiosity with its absurdity, the succeeding images may. As soon as Highway returns from Cuba to Mexico, he contacts the “best cosmetic dental clinic” in Mexico City and has “each of the teeth belonging to the Venus of the big screen transplanted into [his] mouth,” though he does save ten of his old teeth, the best-looking ones, for later, “just in case.” For months afterward, he walks around Mexico City smiling at his appearance in reflections, celebrating his good luck, and believing that “[his] life was a poem.” And this is just the beginning of a serious look at the connections between life, art, and literature.
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Like so many others who read voraciously – all kinds of books, from experimental modern fiction to the classics, from thoughtful novels of ideas to thrillers, and from analytical non-fiction to other-worldly fantasy – I have often been asked to name my favorite author, as if it were possible to choose just one. And as Lloyd Alexander points out above, I tend to read according to mood and what appeals at different stages of my life. My all-time favorite books, however, tend to be those which deal with ideas in a unique way, capturing my imagination at the same time that they convey a new slant on a universal theme. If they are also written with a touch of humor, so much the better. Among my long-time, special favorites are several authors who are little known in the United States, authors whose unique work has continually entertained and surprised me, often moving me to tears at the same time that it has left me with a smile on my face. One such author is Australian author Elizabeth Jolley (1923 – 2007). Simultaneously daring and subtle, insightful and bold, sensitive and sometimes sexy Jolley’s novels are absorbing and satisfying on many levels, and I hope I’ll persuade a few who are unfamiliar with her to take a look at her novels.
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Thoughtful and full of heart, this novel by Ojibway author and storyteller Richard Wagamese is so gripping that it is hard to imagine any reader not being left breathless from the sheer drama of the writing and its overwhelming message. On a magnificent, clear night, Franklin Starlight, age sixteen, and his father Eldon, from whom he has been estranged for nearly all of his life, sit smoking around a campfire in the mountains. Eldon, an alcoholic who is just days away from death, has persuaded his son-in-name-only to accompany him on his final trip “beyond the ridge.” As Eldon shares his story, he makes in a final effort to connect with his son and to reconcile himself with his own guilt about actions from his past. It is a wondrous novel about stories, their importance in our lives and memories, their ability to help us reconcile the past with the present, and ultimately their power to teach us the nature of the world and our relationship to it.
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Life, as understood by Logan Mountstuart, is a series of random events, not events which are fated, controlled by a higher power, or the result of carefully made decisions. But Mountstuart also believes that one can look for and find the extraordinary within the ordinary. Through his personal journals, begun in 1923, when he is seventeen, and continuing to the time of his death in 1991, we come to know Mountstuart intimately, both as an individual, growing and changing, and as an Everyman, someone who participates in and is affected by the seminal events of the 20th century, after World War I. Because he is a writer, he is able to meet Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway (whom he confuses with F. Scott Fitzgerald), Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian Fleming, the reader has the vicarious fun of being there and meeting them, too, since Mountstuart seems very much like the rest of us. He buys early paintings by friends Paul Klee and Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso draws a quick portrait of him and signs it. During World War II, Ian Fleming, who works for the Secret Service, gets Mountstuart a job in Naval Intelligence, where he spies on the Duke of Windsor. After the war, his peripatetic life continues to other continents. Entertaining and fast-paced, despite its length.
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